


Incomprehensible

by Scratch_Pad



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M, Rainer Maria Rilke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 01:05:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15853089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scratch_Pad/pseuds/Scratch_Pad
Summary: Bless me fandom for I have ficced. It has been nine years since my last fic. This show and its tempting, tantalising gaps has lured me into this!There's so many amazing fics here, especially around Rilke, here is a modest contribution.





	Incomprehensible

 

“But it might be _important_ Jack”, Phryne said in her most persuasive tone, widening her eyes at him beseechingly. “How can I work without having complete information?”

German may never have been the most seductive of languages, but almost anything spoken in Jack’s velvet voice did delicious things to her insides, and she was not going to allow him to slip out of this. Not when she had such a marvellous excuse.

“It is, as Hugh deduced, a love poem,” the Inspector said, hands in his pockets and his faint wisp of a smile still on his lips. “That’s all we need to know for this case. Why do you need to understand all of it?”

“How can I know until I hear all of it?” She returned instantly, her counter-attack ready. “There might be a clue.”

He regarded her from under his hat with more than his usual suppressed amusement. “How is it possible that you don’t speak fluent German, Miss Fisher? I thought you spoke every language on earth, and passable Martian besides.”

“I was concentrating on my French, Russian, Italian, and Chinese, _Jack_ ,” she said a little testily. “And I’m not even going to bother to ask how _you_ speak German when you can’t even order a meal in French after being on the Western Front. You’ll only slither out of answering.”

They bickered pleasantly, back and forth, but Phryne could feel his evasions becoming tense, which only made her more curious.

“Come on, Jack. Please? I’d love to hear you read.” She said at last, simply.

His eyes scanned over her face as though trying to find something in it. His own face, eyes hooded and brows raised, as usual gave little away.

Finally he seemed to make a decision; or at least he held out his hand for the book with a martyred sigh. She beamed happily and put it in his hand, but kept hold of it as well, manoeuvring herself to hover over his shoulder.

“It’s this one here, Inspector.” Her breath was intimate against his neck, and she let her fingers brush his over the cut-up pages.

Jack made his most disapproving face at the vandalism of the book, relicts of previous secret love-notes. “Now that should be a capital crime.”

“Lovers do all sorts of improper things, Jack,” she murmured in his ear, and she felt his breath stutter. “Read the original first, and then translate.”

He frowned, his brow furrowing unhappily. He seemed to be on the verge of not going through with it after all. Then abruptly he walked a few steps away from her to stand in the doorway.

His face was in shadow as he angled the book towards the light, and bent his head down closely over the pages. He read through evenly; it wasn’t a very long poem. Though he spoke softly, his deep warm baritone filled the dusty space, reverberating on the wooden wine barrels.

Phryne hardly understood one word of the German, and she luxuriated in the pure sound of his voice. He so rarely spoke at any length. He was listening, usually, not talking.

When he didn’t immediately begin the translation, Phryne cleared her throat pointedly, with a _get on with it Jack_ lift of her eyebrow.

He gave her an admonishing look, which said, _patience, Miss Fisher._

Finally he began,

_“A Love-Poem.”_

_“How can I hold my soul so it does not touch yours? How may I…Pass? Cross… over it, to other things…”_

He stopped and cleared his throat, before continuing, hesitating every few lines, reaching for the correct interpretation.

_“I would have been content to have kept it... hidden away, stored safe, in some distant strange place, dark and quiet. Where it would not …quiver when you quiver. But all that touches us, you and me, takes us together, like the stroke of a bow that draws one chord out of two strings.”_

_“What instrument are we stretched across? What musician holds us in his hands? Oh, sweet song.”_

His voice roughened as he went, and was so quiet by the last line Phryne had to hold her breath to hear him.

He pressed his lips together when he was finished, and stayed with his eyes bent down over the book, blinking his slow blinks. It felt as though an ocean of still air lay between them.

“That was beautiful, Jack,” she said sincerely, breaking the silence at last.

He smiled politely but did not look up. Instead he came back across to the table, avoiding her eye, and picked up another of Oliver Voigt’s books, a slim volume in an austere red cover. Phryne watched him curiously as he browsed through it with the sureness of familiarity.

Suddenly he began to read out loud again.

_"Glaub nicht, daß ich werbe._  
_Engel, und würb ich dich auch! Du kommst nicht. Denn mein_  
_Anruf ist immer voll Hinweg; wider so starke_  
_Strömung kannst du nicht schreiten. Wie ein gestreckter_  
_Arm ist mein Rufen. Und seine zum Greifen_  
_oben offene Hand bleibt vor dir_  
_offen, wie Abwehr und Warnung,_  
_Unfaßlicher, weitauf"_  


There was a very long silence, during which Jack continued gazing meditatively at the pages of the book.

“Well, aren’t you going to translate?” Phryne asked eventually, aware that her voice was pitching desperately upwards.

“I don’t see how it’s relevant, Miss Fisher.” He shut the book decisively, returned it to the trunk, and closed the lid.

 

 

He had told her before. That he loved her, and that this made him unhappy, and that he had tried to find a way to stop. He had told her that he would try to be with her in some way, but he that did not know in what way he could do this.

He had not said all that of course, not in plain English. He used metaphors, oblique hints, Shakespearean monologues. And most of all, his speaking silences. They could communicate so effortlessly in so many ways, while speaking entirely different languages in so many others; he was sending messages to her in some kind of code to which she had only a partial key, an experimental wireless signal dissolving into the crackling air between them.

That look in his ocean-blue eyes while she reached up to settle his new hat on his head! A world of _something_ lay in there, but why did it seem as if that something was as much ‘farewell’ as ‘hello’? He had looked at her as though she were a thousand miles away from him, instead of inches, close enough that the slightest movement was enough to close that gap between their mouths that was becoming so unbearable. She simply couldn’t understand him.

This endless coded, diplomatic waltzing was not in her usual romantic repertoire. She was beyond ready for open warfare, to simply seize him and drag him down on top of her; and so was he, if his uneven breathing was anything to go by.

 

As she couldn’t be precisely certain which book it had been, she directed Miss Leigh’s bookshop to order every edition of this poet Rilke she could track down. It took weeks for them all to arrive.

Now she was the owner of a stack of books she couldn’t read. That man! This had better mean _something_. When she found the key to loosening Jack Robinson’s tongue…one day, and that day had better be damned soon, she would have him read every last one of them to her. With translations. Stripped naked. In her bed.

 

It had been difficult to even identify the volume, a plain cream dustcover hiding the equally austere red leather binding she had seen in Jack’s hands. She leafed eagerly through the thicket of blackletter text, trying to understand it by sheer force of will.

After some futile minutes she had to admit she did not actually read German. She re-approached the problem methodically, turned to the general area she had seen Jack read from and began scanning.

Phryne’s German was terrible, but her memory was excellent. “Engel” —‘Angel’, she had definitley heard, and near it, ‘Hand,’ words that swam up with memories of field hospitals, and a reek of iodine and rot.

They had always been badgering her to improve her smattering of German, although Russian had turned out to be so much more useful. Never had she so badly wished she had spared more time for it than now, not even when people shouting in German had been pointing guns at her. How on earth did _Jack_ speak German? A family background? This revelation was one of the most intriguing yet of her enigmatic Inspector. He must have also been in Intelligence, in some way, the ANZACs were always desperately short of German speakers. She couldn’t simply ask him of course; it spoiled their game to be too direct.

She was becoming impatient again, blindly flipping pages. She made herself slow down, and examine carefully each line for those two words in proximity.

_Engel. Hand._

Finally she found it. She was sure she could recognise the cadence of the lines in Jack’s voice. Dictionary in hand, she worked her way laboriously through a rough translation.

She stared at her result for a long time when she was done. Then she took it to her friend Miss Hegel, a whispy, scholarly creature inhabiting a book-cluttered attic.

“Ah! Rilke! Poor Rilke!” She sighed. “He only died a few years ago, you know, Miss Fisher. I met him once, before the war. Such a sad man.”

Phryne tasted her way through a variety of schnapps while Miss Hegel worked.

“A draft only, Miss Fisher, if you please,” Miss Hegel said, handing her a pencilled sheet, much crossed-out. “Rilke is very…indirect, very difficult to translate. I do not know an adequate English version.”

Phryne mused over it, and drank some more schnapps.

Miss Hegel continued worrying at the poem. “That last line _—’’_ incomprehensible’, or it could be… ‘baffling’?… cannot be encircled, or compassed… ‘Un-graspable’? ‘Unattainable’, perhaps?” She tapped her pencil against her lips. “ _Unfaßlicher.”_

“Yes,” Phryne sighed. “All of those.”

**Author's Note:**

> —Any MFMM fan surely must have looked up the first poem— “Liebes-Leid”, “A Love Poem”, from Rilke’s 1907 New Poems. Whether Phryne speaks German or not is left hanging by the show…I’m going for not, for purposes of fic.  
> I don’t speak German either but roughed out the translation above, triangulated from the many versions online. The lines Jack speaks in the show are from A.S. Kline’s lovely version here- https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/MoreRilke.php
> 
> —The end of the 7th Douino Elegy seemed apt for Jack. This is my favourite translation, by William Gass: 
> 
> Don’t think I’m courting  
> you, Angel.  
> And even if I were! You’d never come.  
> For my call is always full of “stay away.”  
> Against such a powerful current even you cannot advance.  
> My call is like an outstretched arm. And its upturned,  
> open, available hand is always in front of you,  
> yet only to ward off and warn,  
> though wide open, incomprehensible.
> 
> Another very beautiful interpretation by Robert Hunter, with some subtle differences- particularly, it seems ambiguous in the original whether it is the poet or the subject who is ‘unattainable’ or ‘incomprehensible’. I’m sure it’s ambiguous for Jack too!  
> http://www.hunterarchive.com/files/Poetry/Elegies/elegy7.html
> 
> Do not think I woo thee, angel!  
> Should I do so, you would not be moved,  
> so full of conflict is my cry.  
> Against such utter counter force  
> you cannot prevail. My call is like  
> an open hand thrust out to seize,  
> to defend, to warn off-while you,  
> unattainable, receed far beyond its grasp.
> 
> Google Translate produces an evocative, dadaesque version:  
>   
> Do not think that I'm advertising.  
> Angel, and I would dare you too! You are not coming. Because mine  
> Call is always on the way; against such strong  
> You can not move on the current. Like a stretched one  
> Poor is my call. And his for grasping  
> open hand remains in front of you  
> open, like defense and warning,  
> Incomprehensible, far away
> 
>  
> 
> \- We know Phryne was/is an agent used by the Intelligence service; and her knowledge of both Russian and the intricacies of communist factions must put her at the epicentre of European espionage, Moscow 1917-18.


End file.
